Court lifts the curtain on iPhone, iPad US sales numbers

In the deluge of documents, inside baseball and offbeat revelations emerging from Judge Lucy Koh's courtroom as the Apple/Samsung trial proceeds, there are some genuine gems. AllThingsD's Ina Fried points out a pair of disclosures that reveal, in finer detail than either company would like, the extent of Samsung and Apple's phone and tablet sales in the USA.

The numbers aren't entirely (forgive me) apples to Apples, since Samsung's phone lines are broken out by device in granular fashion and the company's sales numbers only go back to 2010 in this disclosure; Apple counts "iPhone" as one product regardless of model, and the counts go all the way to 2007. These numbers also only account for the US, so Samsung and Apple's international sales don't enter into the equation.

Nevertheless, comparing Samsung's domestic phone revenue to Apple's from June 2010 to June 2012, Fried comes up with US$7.5B in revenue for Samsung, and my math shows a total of about $36B for Apple -- nearly five times as much. The higher average selling price of the iPhone contributes heavily to this disparity, as the iPhone only outsold Samsung's overall units by ~60 million to 21.25m in the same period.

On the tablet side, the entire Galaxy Tab line generated $644M in domestic revenue since its introduction in late 2010. Nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but the iPad's US sales since 2010? $19 billion -- 29 times higher than Samsung's tablet number. In fact, the entire multiyear sales arc of the Galaxy Tab is eclipsed by the iPod touch, the underappreciated little sibling of the iOS product line... in the first six months of 2012 alone. ($765 million in iPod touch US sales for Q1 + Q2 2012.)

Another intriguing point on the iPhone sales curve in the States is that in its best quarter to date (Q4 2011, immediately following the introduction of the iPhone 4S) Apple sold 15 million iPhones accounting for revenue of about $9.4 billion. That one quarter alone surpassed the totals for the entire 2010 calendar year (14M units, $8B revenue). Meanwhile, 2012 is still tracking ahead of 2011, and September 12 is getting closer and closer.